summer reading notes 9

Gosine, Andil, 'Visual art after indenture: autoethnographic reflections', South Asian Studies, 33:1 (2017), pp. 105-12.

• Gosine is descendant of indenture (in Trinidad)
• 3 projects: WARDROBES, Our Holy Waters and Mine, After Indenture
• WARDROBES (2011-13): textile and metal based installation telling stories of Savitri (C19) and Jimmy (C21) 
• 'Cutlass': brooch in machete (sugarcane) shape
• 'Rum and Roti' bag
• 'Made with Love' doctor's scrubs with image of parents
• 'Ohrni' headscarf with replica of grandma's anchor tattoo
• Hoped final form of W. to be opera
• Included collabs with other diasporic-experienced artists, incl. Richard Fung, filmmaker
• "Both a private and public interrogation of desire, and its relationship to social trauma" (107)
• Our Holy Waters and Mine (2014)
• Bodies of water: Ganges, those crossed by indenture, and cities from Gosine's life
• Again: sociohistorical <--> personal, intimate: "they are entwined always, but neither is entirely productive of the other" (108) 
• Torabully 'coolitude': "de-essentialising geographical ties to India and biological ones to Indianness" (108)
• Glissant's créolité and Césaire's négritude
• After Indenture (2015-20)
• 'Coolitude' located in "shared experience of indentures, primarily their ship journeys and living conditions on plantations" (109)
• Goals: 
• Public digital archive of visual art re: indenture and post-ind.
• Analysis of art especially re: gender, class, sexuality
• Indenture and art in particular, under-researched
• Sharlene Khan, Wendy Nanan, Ian Harnarine, Roshini Kempadoo, Vannetta Seecharan, Kelly Sinnapah Mary 

Metzger, Sean, 'Roundtable: Imaging and imagining the Chinese Caribbean: Jeannette Kong, Maria Lau, and Laura Fong Prosper', Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 5 (2019), pp. 183-93.

• Jeannette Kong: Canadian filmmaker, Ms Chin Productions - Chinese Jamaicans
• Laura Fong Prosper - video and digital art
• Maria Lau - photography - Cuban Chinese
• Barthes Camera Lucida: stadium (what is immediately apparent to all viewers in image) and punctum (what attracts individual viewer's gaze, wounds them) --> "different orders of meaning" (184) as useful way to think of interacting identities
• Fong Prosper: grew up feeling 'Chinese-Panamanian', took cultural markers for granted -- visited China in 2012 and realised I wasn't Chinese but a hybrid
• "I like to use a lot of saturated color. I think that's my Caribbean heritage: the blue of the deep sea, the green jungle, the intense sun at noon." (186)
• Kong: pre-1980s, Chinese-Jamaicans were mainly all Hakka
• Grandfather arrived in Jam. 1920s
• Identity has expanded once moved to Canada: other Chinesenesses, other Caribbeannesses in community
• "The Chinese in Jamaica" (1957, 1963) by Lee Tom Yin, Jam. photographer Ray Chen's "The Shopkeepers" 
• 1920s-30s - mixed relationships between Jam. women and Chinese men (seen as "rich and virile" (192))

Attewell, Nadine, 'Looking in Stereo: school photography, interracial intimacy, and the pulse of the archive', ADVCATA, 4 (2018), pp. 19-44.

• Maria Lin Wong, Chinese-Liverpudlians (1989)
  
• "Charged sites of encounter between Chinese and other racialised people": Salt Spring Island (Wn Canada), Liverpool, HK
• Transnational resonations
• Tina Campt
• The school photos "disrupt conceptions of the nation (...) through drawing attention to the rhythmic dimensions of national becoming" (23) and imagined community
• Bhabha: nationalist idea of continuation/temporality --> pedagogy but undercut by repetition ('DissemiNation' essay)
• HK Diocesian Boys' School (1920s-1930s) students mainly Chinese but included other races such as European, South Asian, Jewish
• Similarly, 'Chinese Liverpool' must be linked to 'Black Liverpool' - lived in same ethnically diverse areas
• Often white women x men of color
• In BC, Canada, 1936: Chinese students banned from private school
• "Campt approaches the repetition that 'plagues' her archive in terms of black diasporic practices of 'creativity and improviastion', attending to the ways in which individuals actively take up, but also riff on, the sartorial and postural conventions of respectability." (27)
• Repetition in school photos as institutional" (27)
• Reproduction / self-perpetuation: across time (Caroline Levine (2015)) 
• Performative: ritual/ceremony, events made iterable into future
• "Schools, like families, are constituted through exchanges or networks of looks" (28)
• Chrononormativity/chronobiopolitics: making us feel all together/same: photo of today echoes photos of past. Both unified and specific.
• Brit private school 'esprit de corps': idea that each boy is a member of whole society and must act consciously to advance nation (Cecil Clementi, 1927) 
• Oxbridge --> imperial civil service
• Stuart Hall: colonial private schools as "formation and reproduction of the social elite" (Q28) (2017) 
• Students circulated among empire: school --> uni in metropole --> civil service
• Games, prefect system - building character = national progress
• 1922 Victoria, BC: Chinese striked to allow Chinese children into integrate schools
• Danger of recasting historical images as progressive racial mixing and 'diversity' rather than colonial violence
• HK, Liverpool schools endearingly called 'League of Nations' - curiosity, positive, appeal
• White self-congratulation for being 'egalitarian' 
• 'Harmony' as aesthetic
• Sunera Thobani (2007): post-WWII redefinition of whiteness (in Canada etc) as innocently tolerant and multicultural
• Multiculturalism must not be framed as response to Empire it claims to disavow, but as inheritance disseminated institutionally, effects of which we feel today in 'citizenship' ideas
• 'Listening' to a photo: Campt: "a method that reckons with the fissures, gaps, and interstices that emerge when we refuse to accept the 'truth' of images and archives the state seeks to proffer through its production of subjects posed to produce particular 'types' of regulated and regulatable subjects." (Q37) 
• "In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes subjects as 'orientation devices', that take us 'in some directions rather than others'" (66)
• Citation really as political and as love: Campt, Hall, Ahmed... showing her own intellectual lineage/respect
• Photo of 3 (Asian and Black) kids playing music on washtubs
• Chinese laundryman yellow peril trope
• G Formby song 'Chinese laundry blues' (1932)
• "Adapted to new ends, the bugle, washtubs, and ukulele facilitate a different kind of being together, one untethered from the promise of inclusion through which racialised people were (and are) enjoined to labor for the nation (as seamen, as laundrymen, as the entertainment." (40)

Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia', Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 30 (2020), pp. 1-28

• American culture finds it hard to accept Afro-Asia because whiteness isn't included
• Juanita Hall, Af-Am actress best known for playing Chinese characters - even invested life savings into a Chinese restaurant
• Chop suey as mix, miscellany, hybrid/adapted
• Mme Liang in Flower Drum Song (1961) musical
• Cold War orientalism against COmmunist China - As-Ams as patriotic to US 
• "Born out of scarcity and legal exclusion, chop suey bears a history of the problem of digesting racial difference with the arrival of those racialised workers, their ahbits, their diets, their families." (5)
• The Afro-Chinese woman
• Food/eating/hunger as erotic
• Also politicised - she evades categorisation
• Black women as substitutes for Chinese feminine presence (due to restrictive immigration policies)
• "Colonial entanglement of the Black diasporic condition and the overseas Chinese" (6) 
• Chinese men as substitutes for Black labor, post-abolition --> married lcoal women esp. Black women, formed families

To be finished

summer reading notes 8: ayahs; afro-cuban/afro-american network; coolie literature; Chinese anarcho-feminism; UK punk zines

 Robinson, Olivia, 'Travelling Ayahs of the 19th and 20th centuries: global networks and mobilisation of agency', History Workshop Journal, 86 (2018), pp. 44-66.

• Thousands of ayahs, amahs 1890s-1930s arrived in UK
• Either permanently employed or hired just for sea voyage
• Challenging idea of ayah as passive - had agency
• Ayahs neither passengers nor crew - peripheral, Othered position
• "Intimate frontiers of empire"  (44) - Ann Laura Stoler on domestic as sociocultural space where race was negotiated and crucial role of servants in colony
• 3 sites of empire: colony - at sea - metropole
• India, Ceylon, HK, Sg, Malaya, China treaty ports
• Brit women moving to colonies to marry Brit men (from late 1850s) -- otherwise they would marry locals (dangerous)
• 1869 Suez Canal made eastbound trips easier
• In India, domestic service was male-dominated until 1930. Idea of childcare as 'woman's job' was imposed by British women -- created new employment sector for local women
• Childcare = most important role, proximity with mistress 
• Infants only - older children with British nurse or sent back to UK
• Being 'part of family' also reinforced loyalty
• Infantilising colonial natives - Brit mistresses (memsahib) must treat native servants like children
• But dilemma of ayah raising white children
• Need constant surveillance / policing of servants
• Thus both central and peripheral
• On ship, ayah couldn't travel First Class with family and white servant - relegated to mixed-gender deck (worst ticket)
• No bed: ayah needed to bring own mattress and overall seregation from family despite doing all the childcare
• 1920s got better but formalised distance - eg own toilets
• No names on passenger list - just 'Ayah', literally belonging to employers 
• Ayah's Home, London existed for many years before being taken over by Ldn City Mission (evangelists) - excl. for non-white nannies
• Only sources are Brit managers - racialised, infantilising 
• Idea of 'family unit' with superintendent and wife as 'parents' 
• Commercial and expensive (paid for by employer wife)
• Ayahs needed character references and could be expelled for misbehavior - not 'charity' 
• 12 instances of ayahs unable to return home - India Office denied responsibility, sent them to Ayah's Home to sort it out (find a new family)
• Resemblance to New Poor Law - out of sight, out of mind
• Overall Ayah never allowed to stay in the UK
• Overly victimising narrative - Ayahs found ways to capitalise on situation
• Many Ayahs specifically worked only on ships - hired out by agencies
• Much skill needed: able to serve and travel
• Some went to Australia, Americas etc - "sophisticated recruitment infrastructure" (54), much demand
• Also private ads: mistresses wanting Ayahs or trying to get new family for current Ayah
• Traveling ayahs were diverse whereas local (non-travelling) ayahs were sweeper caste and married to family's sweeper
• Many widows
• Very high wages compared to regular ayahs - very valued, kept considerable savings 
• Could negotiate or demand/set own payment
• Regularly went to UK - not 'lost'
• Sometimes sole adult carer of kids
• Not afraid to lodge complaints with authorities
• Ayah's Home stay seen as inevitable downtime between jobs - some did extra work (textiles, selling items between UK and colony) 
• Home segreg. by ethnicity but they mingled socially: games, sharing food 

Guridy, Frank Andre, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapell Hill, 2010)

Introduction

• Juan René Betancourt: anti-racist activist in Cuba since 1940s
• Castro liberates Cuba 1959: Betancourt participated in new gov's anti discrimination efforts- but clashed and exiled
• Critiqued gov's treatment of Afro-Cubans in 'Castro & the Cuban N-gro' (1961) - appealing to Af-Ams
• Af-Cub and Af-Am exchange history based on shared 'colored'/diasporic identity
• Black, upwardly mobile elite non-state
• Cuba's geog. proximity = unique
• Affected by Cold War - new idea of 'Third World' and 'wretched of the earth' liberation struggles who "framed their demands within the dominant discourse of nationalism" which "overshadowed forms of solidarity that were not driven by the precepts of nat'ism" (2) 
• Cuban Rev's explicit identification with African struggles = legitimacy of nation
• Rise of new Af-Cub/Am network (1959-60) initiated by Cub gov to get Af-Am support: incl Amiri Baraka
• Castro visits Harlem, Malcolm X in 1960
• Guridy examines pre-Castro network (mainly first half of C20)
• Diaspora identification did not contradict nationalism
• "We have yet to fully investigate how transnational modes of belonging are created and maintained" (4)
• Segregation and imperialism impelled Black people to develop alternative networks - material benefit eg education, political support
• 'Routes' not 'roots' (slavery) which doesn't necessarily centralise African continental homeland
• James Clifford
• Not 'Black internationalism', not simple but v. varied
• Diaspora in practice
• Af-Cub patriots/nat'ists looked to Booker T Washington's Tuskegee Institute as role model
• Diaspora-making process: translations and misunderstandings
• 'US-Caribbean world': trade networks C18 --> war of 1898 when US started intervening more
• Linked northeastern US cities to southern US & Carib 
• Increased tourism in 1910s-30s, corporate transport/travel (steamships)
• Armed intervention and US cultural spread (protestantism, consumerism) incl. Panama Canal
• Cuba prominent due to size and proximity = appeal to US 
• Range of social actors with diff. interests in US presence
• Black people were main laborers, incl.  inter-island migration
• Happening alongside US 'great migration' which included Anglophone Carib. 
• Garveyism would be born here
•  US presence in Cuba shaped/encouraged construction of nat'l identity and of race
• "Cross-fertilisation" (10) 
• Cuba had a KKK from 1920s+ 
• Recreation and leisure segreg. in Cuba - under-studied
• Af-Cubs made own communities - 'sociedades de color' eg Club Atenas - elite
• Diaspora felt they were more civilised than Africans and wanted to 'uplift' Black race - esp Af-Ams (imperialism) 
• Garvey's UNIA (Universal N-gro Improvement Association) vibrant performance culture
• Cuba had most UNIA divisions outside USA 
• Harlem Ren <----> Afrocubanismo: artists taking up ethnic forms /motifs
• Black tourism 1930s - 50s to Cuba - adapting to racial exclusion in leisure industry

Goffe, Tao Leigh, 'Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the "Coolie"', Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, 22:1 (2014), pp. 53-61.

• 2 conemp novels: The Pagoda by P Powell (1998), The Book of Salt by M Truong (2003) - queering the colonial archive, giving voice
• The 'undocumented' means "to be rendered an 'impossible subject'" (Mae Ngai, 2004) - illegality, foreignness 
• Silence of coolies in the archive - eg intimacy, interiority
• Despite coolies pre-occupying/figuring in Euro colonial imaginary of C19
• The origin of word 'coolie' is uncertain - like the coolie himself
• Gujarati worker caste 'koli'? 
• Portuguese 'cule' - laborer in India? 
• Mandarin 'ku li' bitter strength? 
• Unskilled, inscrutable, desexualised (male)
• Coolies supposed to return after contract but in Carib they were 'buffer race' between white/Black post-slavery so encouraged to settle
• Women brought over to form families
• Usually derogative - reclaimed
• H. T. Tsing And China has hands: a Chinese coolie odyssey (1937)
• David Dabydeen Coolie Odyssey (1988)
• Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman (2013)
• Khal Torabully - 'coolitude' (2002) - answer to 'negritude' 
• Coolie as active agent
• Lisa Lowe The intimacies of 4 continents (2006)
• Lisa Yun The coolie speaks (Cuba) (2010)
• Denise Helly A Hidden history of the Chinese in Cuba (1997)
• Chinese coolies subverted, protested, escaped -not passive
• Chinese gov ended 'coolie' trade, 1874
• Moon-Ho Jung Coolies  and Cane (2006)
• Richard Jean So dissertation 'Coolie democracy 1925-1955' (2009)
• Fiction intervenes in colonial records 
• Queering as "a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed" (55)
• Butler's analysis of N. Larsen Passing: "'queering' works as the exposure within language  - an exposure that disrupts the repressive surface of language - of both sexuality and race" (Q55)
• The Pagoda: cross-dressing/trans shopkeeper Lowe in late C19 Jamaica - if there were women coolies, would they have been recorded?
• Book of Salt - Viet cook, Binh, works for Gertrude Stein in Paris and is gay
• Both concern afterlife of coolie experience although are not actually coolies (plantation labor) 
• David Eng (2008): we shouldn't see historical ethnic texts as correcting/remedying - Truong's historical misnaming/playfulness shows it doesn't matter whether or not the story actually happened/is based in truth. 
• Both chars have sexual relationships with Black ppl - kinship in marginalisation, a connection not founded with white ppl
• "In The Pagoda and The Book of Salt, the 'coolie' does not just speak, the 'coolie' screams (...) This scream straddles the boundary between pleasure and pain" (56)
• 3 'intimate occupations': 
• 'Unskilled' laborer identity: marginal, yet crucial to the economy - esp as both handle food (store owner and cook) 
• Colonial settings pre-US occupation: 1890s British Jamaica, 1930s French Vietnam
• Occupying space in colonial archive
• --> "Refusing to assimilate to fixed constructions of race, gender, and sexuality" (57)
• They actually have much skill and power and control in their jobs
• 'Chiney' groceries in Jamaica: social space; known to extend credit more generously
• Yet marginalised due to class, race, sexuality
• Not rewriting the past: "meditate on teh production of history and the role of power" (59)
• In the end, Binh and Lowe are freed from their occupations

Liu, Lydia H., R. E. Karl,  and D. Ko (eds.), The Birth of Chinese feminism: essential texts in transnational theory (New York, 2013) unfinished

Introduction

• 'The Women's Bell' (1903), Jin Tianhe (male) - seen as first Chinese feminist manifesto, very popular and influential 
• He-Yin Zhen (anarcho-feminist, founder of Natural Justice journal) critiqued male feminists in 1907-8 as "pursuit of self-distinction in the name of women's liberation" (Q2)
• Modelling themselves on Wn/modern societies
• "As far as Jin Tianhe was concerned, women's emancipation was part of a larger project of enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either 'male' or 'patriarchal'" (7)
• 'Modern woman' in Shanghai ads = progress
• Tianyi/Nat Justice pub by Society for the Restoration of Women's Rights, Tokyo
• Featured first Chinese trans. of Communist Manifesto! (1908)
• For HYZ: feminism "was the beginning and outcome of a total social revolution that would abolish the state and private property to bring about true social equality" (7) and anticapitalist
• Plurality and contradictions of Chinese feminisms
• Defies East/West binary
• HYZ's analysis was totalising: everything is connected
• 'Woman' as "transhistorical global category (...) constituted through scholarship, ritual, law, and social and labor practices over time" (9)
• "History is formed by a continuously reproduced injustice in the manner of what the Annales school of French historians would come to call the longue durée" (9)
• Woman = "product of historical social relations" (10)
• Political ontology
• Analytical category of Nannü (男女) - a framework to understand this totality/structure and always-gendered life (more comprehensive than the word 'gender')
• Shengji / livelihood - more than 'class'
• Nannü is single concept: both noun and adjective, which "lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction." (11) - hard to translate
• HYZ's own moment was porous for language : influences from Jp and W, pioneering new vernacular
• "Far more productive is to tease out the theoretical resonances in the spaces opened up between nannü and 'gender' or any such categories in contemp. feminist theories, which have always passed back and forth through a multiplicity of mod. langs." (12)
• "Her critique demonstrates that the normative function of nannü is not only to create 'gendered' identities (which it also does) but also to introduce primary distinctions through socioeconomic abstractions such as the external and the internal, or to such cosmic abstractions as yang and yin" (14)
• No biological view of sexual differnce, unlike in Europe. So there was no need for HYZ to oppose this on the sex/gender differention aspect, like Europeans had to.
• Critique from "within -- and against -- the indig. Confucian tradition, especially its theories of human nature" (15)

Ripped, torn, and cut: pop, politics, and punk fanzines from 1976, ed. Subcultures Network (Manchester, 2018). Unfinished

Introduction: adventures in reality, why (punk) fanzines matter - M. Worley, K. Gildart, A. Gough-Yates, S. Lincoln, B. Osgerby, L Robinson, J Street, P Webb

• UK's first self-defined punk fanzine: Sniffin' Glue by Mark Perry, 1976
• Fanzines as "residues of youthful agency" (2)
• Cut and paste imagery, Xeroxed/Roneo-stencilled, sold for low cost at gigs, schools, record shops
• Increasingly political and experimental - eg Lucy Whitman JOLT (1977) 
• Help map shifts from 1976-77 punk 'moment' to 1980s culture
• Shows punk in provinces and outside London - diverse
• Nancy Fraser, 'subaltern counterpublic' - alternate, oppositional
• Teal Triggs Fanzines (2010); Stephen Duncombe Notes from the Underground: Zines and the politics of alt. culture (2008) 
• History of zines:
• 1930s sci-fi, US and Uk
• Expanded across cultural spheres
• Punk zines' visual language essential to aesthetic
• Riot grrrl material @ Fales library, NY
• Zines in BL, V&A, Manchester District Music Archive, Bristol Arch Records